[M]ore schools in Vermont are taking advantage of a federal program that offers free meals to all students in low-income areas.
In 2014, 29 schools in Vermont signed up with the “universal” meal program and began serving free breakfast and lunch to all students whether they qualified for free meals or not. Two years later, the number of schools participating has nearly doubled to 56, according to Marissa Parisi, executive director at Hunger Free Vermont.
Parisis said in all, 19 percent of Vermont’s schools and 15 percent of all Vermont students, are using the program.
“We are psyched with the numbers,” Parisi said. Hunger Free Vermont and the Dartmouth Institute are monitoring the rollout of the program.
Only the poorest schools qualify for the universal meals program passed by Congress in 2010 known as the Community Eligibility Program. The voluntary program is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and it provides free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of income at schools with high numbers of low-income pupils who qualify for the free lunch program.
Under the new program, local districts are reimbursed with federal dollars using a formula based on the percent of kids that already get food stamps and receive other direct government assistance. The Community Eligibility Program has helped schools in Vermont that used to run deficits with their meal programs to break even, according to Anore Horton, the nutrition initiatives director at Hunger Free Vermont, which promotes the program with school principals and business managers.
Horton says that a number of Vermont school meal programs operate at a deficit. Federal reimbursements per meal, plus money from families who pay for school lunches often doesn’t cover the costs and the district ends up paying for the program out of the general school budget.
That is no longer the case for 99 percent of the schools that have joined the new federal program, according to Horton who said, “it has improved the finances of the meal program in nearly every school that is using it.”
“It doesn’t cost the state of Vermont anything,” Horton said.
But, she is quick to add that “the success we have seen so far is not necessarily going to be the case for all the other schools in Vermont who might want to use this program.” In order to qualify, schools have to have a high enough percent of students receiving benefits directly from the federal government.
“Being able to serve meals to all the kids for free has helped the bottom lines of those school meal programs,” Parisi said. When meals are made available to all students, the participation rate goes up and schools can capture more federal reimbursement payments, she said.
Students who qualify “directly” for free meals are eligible because their families are either on food stamps, homeless, in a foster home, or live at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. These students don’t apply for free meals; they automatically get free food at school.
Students in the free and reduced-price lunch program come from families living at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. They have to apply for the program at the beginning of each school year.
In Vermont, 40 percent of students are eligible for FRL. The “reduced price” category was eliminated when the Legislature voted to cover the entire cost for all eligible students.
Because of the way the reimbursement rate is calculated under the new universal meals program, schools with a high percentage of low income kids do better financially even though they are covering the cost of meals for students who could afford to pay for lunch, Horton said.
“If 40 percent to 50 percent and sometimes 60 percent of the students are already on a safety net program, that means that probably the entire population of the school will benefit from the meals,” said Parisi. “The great thing about the CEP program is that it really does help bring more money into the schools for nutritious food and that goes out to all the kids.”
At first, Hunger Free Vermont recommended that only schools with more than 55 percent of students qualifying take part in the Community Eligibility Program. Unsure of how far the federal money would stretch, some school districts set money aside to make sure they had enough to cover the costs. No one has had to use the reserve, Parisi said, because “they can run it almost entirely on federal money.”
Laurie Colgan, who runs child nutrition programs for the Agency of Education, agreed that CEP tends to pay for itself. But if should there be a shortfall, the local district or local general fund would have to pick up the difference, she said.
During the first year schools participated in the new universal meal program in Vermont, three elementary schools in Orleans Central Supervisory Union participated. Colgan said those schools did better than break even.
“As a result of CEP [or the universal meal program], their local districts had to put in either no money or less money than they had in the past. It is saving the state money and it is also saving local money,” Colgan said.
Schools traditionally don’t turn children away if they can’t pay. That often comes at a cost to the local school budget, according to Parisi.
“So taxpayers were paying to take care of that debt, but that isn’t happening anymore. They are breaking even,” she said.
In addition, schools that take advantage of the USDA funded program are freed from the red tape that comes with the traditional FRL program. Schools don’t have to hire and train people to process FRL applications, lunch line cashiers are no longer necessary, and no one has to make sure each meal is accounted for and billed correctly.
“Many schools have seen that by not having to do the extensive backend work on accounting on the school meal program they can plan better and are able to run a better business. It is a new way to look at it and a way for schools to save money and provide more nutrition for kids,” Parisi said.
No one has looked into how many students are now getting free meals who could pay for their lunches, according to Colgan.
“We could go back to a point in time when the school was not participating in CEP and compare that to their previous (free and reduced-price lunch) participation. It would tell you potentially how many are in CEP. I can tell you the percent claimed at the paid rate, but that doesn’t tell you the actual number of non-eligible students in that school,” Colgan explained. She also said that even families eligible for the federal program don’t always apply.
